The Not Yet Fallen World: New and Selected Poems

by Stephen Dunn

A radiant celebration of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn’s enduring oeuvre. Hailed as "indispensable" (David Wojahn), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation, and alert us to the haunting wonders and relationships that surround us. The Not Yet Fallen World draws from all nineteen of Stephen Dunn’s crystalline volumes, including his most recent, Pagan Virtues (2019); the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Loosestrife (1996); and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Different Hours (2000). By turns sardonic and profound, Dunn examines the disguises we don to hide from ourselves and reveals sublime beauty hidden within seemingly mundane interactions. Nine new poems extend the poet’s inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary life; as he writes in "Love Poem Near the End of the World," "Something keeps me holding on / to a future I didn’t think possible." Arranged to further Dunn’s signature themes―mortality, morality, and the roles we play in the essential human comedy of getting through each day―this final collection captures the breadth of an acclaimed poet’s achievement. His legacy is a poetic expanse suffused with fearless generosity and perceptive wisdom.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Hardcover

Published May 24, 2022

About the author

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing.

Dunn's books of poetry include Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling 1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).

Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Dunn is currently Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

Reviews

[jus · Rating 3 out of 5]

“…oh you never could have imagined
back then with the waves crashing
what the body could erase.
It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,
the story-fodder;
everything you retrieve is your past,
everything you let go
goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,
in cahoots with thin air…”

[Bruce Wasserman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review for the New York Journal of Books:

There’s something magical about the number thirteen: there are thirteen stripes on the American flag, thirteen is a prime and therefore indivisible number, in the Jewish calendar a leap year has thirteen months and Steven Dunn’s new book, The Not Yet Fallen World, is presented in thirteen parts. Dunn, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of nineteen previous full-length poetry collections, was a master of conjuring language and this final collection of his, featuring selected works from all nineteen of his previous volumes and including nine new poems, is a hefty tome that provides readers with a balanced look at just what a poet of Dunn’s skill and experience can bring to the world with concentrated and talented effort.

“Anyone who begins a sentence with, ‘In all honesty…’ / is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says,
‘This is how I feel’ / had better love form more than disclosure,” Dunn begins in his opening poem, “Propositions,” and with these brushstrokes, the masterful telling and the complexity, the simplicity and the sagacious wit begin. Even with these first lines of this collection’s first poem, the reader will see a flash of light, a puff of smoke and voila! Stephen Dunn appears like an image on a 19th century tintype: not pretentious or overstated but simply real. Any poet could learn from Dunn and countless poets have benefited from his deft pen in his sixty-year career.

“If you say, ‘You’re ugly’ to an ugly person,” Dunn continues, “—no credit / for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act / that qualifies as an achievement. If you persist / you’re just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror…” Without any other entrée, Dunn has, in the space of just two stanzas, done something akin to planting the flag on Iwo Jima in WWII. The poem showcases the mastery of the poet, and that, all well-contained within one page. There is a reason why Dunn has been published again and again and again. Future poets, take note: Stephen Dunn is the real deal.

Rita Dove, a former United States Poet Laureate, calls Dunn, “A poet who time and again achieves that most difficult magic of the ordinary,” and that mark falls fast and close to the centerline.

Read the rest of this review at www.nyjournalofbooks.com

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this so slowly because I wanted it to last forever.

His poems are stories and important messages about what has happened, in his life, perhaps, but because he thinks widely, it feels as if it about all our lives. These poems aren't afraid of talking directly about morality, but they never corner me or themselves. They walk ordinary streets, sometimes in suburbs and still manage to acknowledge the heavens. Poems so light on their feet you don't see how they can hold the weight they do.

[Henry Bones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book filled me with such nostalgia for all that (the late) Dunn was as a poet: argumentative (especially with himself), thoughtful, more than a little cynical and pessimistic, slightly fantastical, but mostly caught up in the particulars of intimate encounters and transient conversations, gleaning from such moments truths about broader failures of human life that we seldom address: the symbolic misunderstandings and the existential obstacles to a purer sense of honesty. I will miss his (oh so familiar) poetic voice.

[Wilbur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not his best.

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet Stephen Dunn died on his birthday in June 2021. Eleven months later, W. W. Norton & Company, a publishing house that has long been a friend to poetry, brought out his THE NOT YET FALLEN WORLD: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED. It takes its place as a major contribution to what Hayden Carruth, in titling a classic anthology of American poetry, called “the voice that is great within us.”

The long poem “Round Trip” opens with this:



I watched the prairie repeat itself
until it got beautiful, the geometry
of farms, the flatness

that made interesting the slightest
undulation. Never had the sky
touched so far down.

That reference to the sky arrested me when I first came to it, and it moves me again as I type it out now. Later in the same poem, Dunn gives us this: “the low sky / we don’t call sky for some reason.” Yes, all the way to the ground. Thank you, Stephen Dunn.

“Something Like Happiness” opens with this:

Last night Joan Sutherland was nuancing
the stratosphere on my fine-tuned tape deck …

Move over, Eliot. Dunn’s “Buryng the Cat” opens with this:



Her name was Isadora and, like all cats,
she was a machine made of rubber bands
and muscle, exemplar of crouch
and pounce, genius of leisure.

From “A Petty Thing,” a poem in which Dunn also does crickets:

Nearby, I know, mice are squinching
themselves tiny, getting into houses.

How nettlesome of Spellcheck not to accept “squinching.”

And how inadequate of me to be quoting bits and pieces from the complex work of a poet who in “The Reverse Side” opens with this:

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is — the opposite
of what we said.

If there is any justice (an open question), Stephen Dunn is a poet whose work will endure.

[Joel Goh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this on the strength of one or two of Dunn's poems I've come across online. Was fairly disappointed by this collection and by Dunn's writing. Initially rated this 3 stars but I have now changed it to 2, several weeks later upon writing this.

Would instead recommend Carl Dennis who does directness and matter of factness a whole lot better.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Dunn's poetry. He was my teacher, changed how I saw the possibilities in poetry. I am biased.